Right Thinking from the Left Coast

Tag: North Carolina

Just remember, kids, our media are totally not biased. That’s why things like this happen:

National media coverage of North Carolina’s Senate race between incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan and Republican challenger Thom Tillis has focused on Hagan’s allegedly “perfect” campaign, in which the Senator has hammered her opponent on his record of attempting to reform a horrifically inefficient state education system while serving as Speaker of the state’s House of Representatives.

Admittedly, education is a far more appealing wedge issue than claiming one’s opponent plans to ban condoms, but lurking beneath the surface of the Hagan-Tillis race is a troubling ethics issue, one that has gone virtually unreported by North Carolina’s two largest newspapers, the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer: that Kay Hagan’s family, including her attorney husband “Chip” Hagan, her son, and her son-in-law, made out like bandits under the 2009 federal “stimulus” bill championed by Senator Hagan, receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovate buildings owned by their companies through solar power companies which, coincidentally, were also owned by the Hagan family. Instead, coverage of this potential conflict of interest, in which Hagan’s family may have benefitted from her vote and her political connections, has been left to the tiny Carolina Journal, a blog run by North Carolina’s economic libertarian John Locke Foundation, which has run rings around the state’s larger papers in coverage of this race.

Last night, the Charlotte Observer posted some coverage of the story (note, this is less than 48 hours before the election). Today, they tried to memory-hole the story but conservative sites have archived it.

I’m sitting her with my jaw on the floor. You know damn well that if, say, Jeb Bush had stimulus dollars flowing to his family in possible violation of regulations, it would be a front-page story. It’s simply stunning that a major news outlet would ignore it. The deference to the powerful — no matter what their political stripe — is absurd.